ABSTRACT
In the wide-ranging international literature on care (which includes scholarship on law, education and health, amongst others1), care has been associated with attempts to value social life in ways that foreground interconnection and thus offer a critique of the encroaching spread of competitive instrumentalist individualism – an individualism typically linked with neo-liberalism and/or ‘moral decline’. Care has, in short, been a means to envisage an alternative direction for social life, indeed an alternative politics. On this basis, the language of care offers both advantages and problems and has, not surprisingly, been the subject of considerable heated debate.
